Le Chandail De Hockey

This is hilarious!

Move Towards Pain

Another little ditty from Mastery.

When John Keats (1795-1821) was eight years old, his father died in a riding accident. His mother never quite got over the loss and died seven years later—essentially leaving John, his two brothers, and one sister orphaned and homeless in London. John, the eldest of the children, was taken out of school by the appointed trustee and guardian of the estate, and enrolled as an apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary—he would have to earn a living as quickly as possible, and this seemed the best career for that.

In his last few terms at school, Keats had developed a love for literature and reading. To continue his education, he would return to his school in his off hours and read as many books as he could in the library. Some time later, he had the desire to try his hand at writing poetry, but lacking any kind of instructor or literary circle he could frequent, the only way he know to teach himself to write was the read the works of all of the greatest poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He then wrote his own poems using the poetic form and style of the particular writer he was trying to model himself after. He had a knack for imitation, and soon he was creating verses in dozens of different styles, always tweaking them a little with his own voice.

Several years into this process, Keats came to a fateful decision—he would devote his life to writing poetry. That was his calling in life and he would find a away to make a living at it. To complete the rigorous apprenticeship he had already put himself through, he decided that what he needed was to write a very long poem, precisely 4000 lines. The poem would revolve around the ancient Greek myth of Endymion. “Endymion,” he wrote a friend, “will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention …—by which I must make 4000 lines of some circumstances and fill them with Poetry.” He gave himself a rather impossible deadline—seven months—and a task of writing fifty lines a day, until he had a rough draft.

Three quarters of the way through, he came to thoroughly hate the poem he was writing. He would not quit, however, willing his way to the end, meeting the deadline he had set. What he did not like about Endymion was the flowery language, the over-writing. But it was only by means of this exercise that he could discover what worked for him. “In Endymion,” he later wrote, “I leaped headlong into the Sea and thereby became better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and … took tea and comfortable advice.”

In the aftermath of writing what he considered to be a mediocre poem, Keats took stock of all of the invaluable lessons he had learned. Never again would he suffer from writer’s block—he had trained himself to write past any obstacle. He had acquired now the habit of writing quickly, with intensity and focus—concentrating his work in a few hours. He could revise with equal speed. He had learned how to criticize himself and his overly romantic tendencies. He could look at his own work with a cold eye. He had learned that it was in the actual writing of the poem that the best ideas would often come to him, and that he had to boldly keep writing or he would miss such discoveries. Most important of all, as a counterexample of Endymion, he had hit upon a style that suited him—language as compact and dense with imagery as possible, with not a single wasted line.

With these lessons in hand, in the years 1818 to 1819, before he became gravely ill, Keats would produce some of the most memorable poems in the English language, including all of his greatest odes. This added up to perhaps the most productive two years of writing in the history of Western literature—all of it set up by the rigorous self-apprenticeship he had put himself through.

***

By nature, we humans shirk from anything that seems possibly painful or overtly difficult. We bring this natural tendency to our practice of any skill. Once we grow adept at some aspect of this skill, generally one that comes more easily to us, we prefer to practice this element over and over. Our skill becomes lopsided as we avoid our weaknesses. Knowing that in our practice we can let down our guard, since we are not being watched or under pressure to perform, we bring to this a kind of dispersed attention. We tend to also be quite conventional in our practice routines. We generally follow what others have done, performing the accepted exercises for those skills.

This is the path of amateurs. To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance of Practice. The principle is simple—you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. First you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself. You become your own worst critic; you see your work as if through the eyes of others. You recognize your weaknesses, precisely the elements you are not good at. Those are the aspects you give precedence to in your practice. You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring. Second, you resist the lure of easing up on your focus. You train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two. In devising your own routines, you become as creative as possible. You invent exercises that work upon your weaknesses. You give yourself arbitrary deadlines to meet certain standards, constantly pushing yourself past perceived limits. In this way, you develop your own standards for excellence, generally higher than those of others.

In the end, your five hours of intense, focused work are the equivalent of ten for most people. Soon enough you will see the results of such practice, and others will marvel at the apparent ease in which you accomplish your deeds.

Heliocentricism

A story:

Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.” To which Wittgenstein responded, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

Nod, nod.

Saint Shyster

A cautionary tale of boom and bust:

Let’s imagine a society slightly different from the one we currently live in: a society like that of days gone by, in which the workforce is paid in cash at the end of each week, in personalized little brown envelopes.

Now imagine that we can divide this workforce into two different types of people. The first type is honest and hardworking and puts in a full week’s work. Let’s call them the saints. The other is dishonest and lazy and preys upon its diligent counterparts as they make their way home on a Friday, lying in wait outside the factory gates and appropriating their hard-earned wages for themselves. Let’s call them the shysters.

At first it would seem as if the shysters have got it made: that crime pays. And, indeed, in the short term at least, it does. The saints clock in to keep the community going, while the shysters reap a twofold benefit. Not only do they enjoy the advantages of living in a flourishing society, they also, by stealing the saints’ wages, “get paid” for doing nothing. Nice work if you can get it.

But notice what happens if the pattern of behavior continues. The saints begin to tire and fall sick. Having less disposable income with which to look after themselves, they begin to die out. Gradually, the ratio of the “working” population starts to shift in favor of the shysters. But this, of course, is precisely what the shysters don’t want! With the number of saints diminishing by the week, the likelihood increases that the shysters will encounter each other. Moreover, even if they do run into a saint, there’s a greater chance that they’ll come away empty-handed. Another shyster may well have beaten them to it.

Eventually, if the fun and games are allowed to play out naturally, the power balance comes full circle. The pendulum swings back in favor of the saints, and society reverts to working for a living. But note how history is programmed to repeat itself. The saints call the shots for only such time as the economy is in recession, and the shysters preside for only as long as the saints can keep them afloat. It’s a bleak carousel of recurring boom and bust.

Double Toil and Trouble

We walked out of the meeting to hold one of our own, those impromptu get-together for those who want to continue talking because they felt they didn’t get enough of it during the meeting itself or to gossip about the people from the meeting.

As usual, it was “held” in the hallway as the other meeting attendees filed past us while shooting various looks ranging from barbed, squinty ones to tired, “I can’t believe these jerks still want to talk more”.

I don’t know why I wanted to take part, but one of the guys I knew and sort of liked had decided to stop and talk so I did, too. Stupid, I should have said my see-you-laters and been on my way.

After some preliminaries, which went as well as can be expected among friends, the we bit through the hard shell and got to the soft, chewy nougat center: when was friend and co going to be able to migrate their agency into the consolidated environment?

“Our environment is so complex, it’ll take us three years,” Friend Guy said.

“Three years?!” I cried incredulously.

“Oh yes. We’ve got all sorts of applications and we’re going to have the vendors come back in to reconfigure them. In addition, there are Solaris servers that cannot be migrated …” he droned on.

Given what I knew about Friend Guy, he was a batty combination of technician who knew just enough to understand the generalities of the technology we used but not enough to prevent a drowning death. In other words, he was a Windows systems administrator.

I had usually just shrugged the old shoulders and moved the subject on to other, safer topics. You see, Friend Guy is a loud son-of-a-bitch with a God-granted baritone that could stop a charging rhino. He epitomized the adage about the man with the microphone always wins, only he needed no microphone.

Today however, I decided to dust off my SCUBA equipment and go for a deep dive. Like an alligator who latches on to the leg of the wildebeest and drags it down in the water, log-rolling all the way, I’d gotten tired of the bluster and wanted to hear that dying gurgle.

“I doubt it would take 3 years, Friend Guy. I mean, we aren’t talking about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter here. This is tried-and-true stuff. The protocols we use for authentication are all well-known; and besides …” I started.

“No, no, man. You have no idea, it’s very complex.” He bellowed.

“No, it’s not,” I asserted. “This is the same thing Tax said when they were initially migrating. As it turned out, it took us less than two months to get them on board. They, too, had originally thought it would take years.”

No way was I going to let go of my grip on that yummy wildebeest leg. Doubling down, I dove deeper.

“Here’s the thing, it’s all standardized protocols that we know about and unless you guys are doing something completely untoward, we can handle. And by untoward, I mean Banyan Vines, or some shit like that.”

“No, but we’re using SAMBA” he said, still bellowing although the strong wind had died down to a stiff breeze.

“SAMBA is still a protocol we understand how use, Friend Guy. It’s not that complex.” I plod on, determined to persevere.

“Yeah, but on Solaris?”

A glint had appeared in his eye, the kind of glint a man who was about to put the sword to the neck of a vanquished enemy in the arena would have in his eye. A smile began to break the edges of his lips as they prepared to form a smirk.

“Solaris? Please. You forget I was a UNIX administrator before I started working here, right? In fact, by using SAMBA on Solaris, you’re actually reducing the security of your Active Directory.” I said as I trained my alligator eyes on his panicked wildebeest eyes.

I continued.

“By the way, who told you it would take three years? The vendors? Because you know that vendors would love nothing more than to drag out the so-called reconfiguration so they can charge you heaven and earth for shit that’s easy to do.”

“No, it wasn’t the vendors. It was my boss,” he said, with a little less enthusiasm.

“Your boss?”

“Yeah.”

“Is your boss a programmer?”

“No, he’s been in IT for a long time and has done a lot of these kinds of migrations and he knows how they …”

Oh now, this was too much. What an  utterly ridiculous thing to say and, being in the no-nonsense river of death, I decided to apply the coup de grâce.

“Oh come on, that’s a fallacy, Friend Guy. Just because someone’s been in IT a long time doesn’t mean he knows anything about this particular migra—” I began.

“OH, AND  YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING! PLEASE. I’M OUTTA HERE.”

Caught flat-footed for a second, it dawned on me he was attempting the old Ninja vanishing trick, only it wasn’t with smoke bombs, but the blistering hot air of bluster.

“Oh no,” I thought, “you’re not getting away that easy.”

“Are you running away?” I said to his retreating back, raising and holding a plastered smile on my face.

He turned back for a split second and shot me a look that told me he was no longer Friend Guy, just Guy and continued shuffling away in a cloud of more bluster.

Oh well, you win some, you win some.